Firefly

The goal of the Firefly project is to showcase tools and frameworks developed at iMinds IoT lab and Homelab:

• AIOLOS: an OSGi-based distributed computing platform for connecting IoT gateways to the cloud and end-user devices.

• DYAMAND (DYnamic, Adaptive MAnagement of Networks and Devices): an interopability framework allowing to integrate with different sensors of different manufacturers.

The Firefly project provides a collection of Thing abstractions, allowing to interface with physical things in the OSGi world through OSGi services, a web-based dashboard UI that visualizes all available things in the network, and a rule engine to connect sensors to actuators.

Firefly also builds upon OSGi enRoute, a toolchain developed by the OSGi Alliance to facilitate the development of OSGi applications.

Building and running Firefly

Since Firefly uses enRoute, make sure you have the following prerequisites:

• Java 8
• Eclipse IDE
• Git
• Bndtools 3

To build and run Firefly, import the Firefly projects into your Eclipse workspace and open the be.iminds.iot.firefly.dashboard.application project, which is the main dashboard application project. In that project, you find a couple of .bndrun files that describe a launch configuration:

• standalone.bndrun : a standalone run configuration deploying all features on a single runtime
• gw.bndrun : a gateway run configuration to deploy on a headless gateway; can connect to a repository configuration using AIOLOS
• server.bndrun : a server run configuration that can connect to one or more gateways running the gateway configuration providing a thing repository, UI and rule engine
• debug.bndrun : an extension of the standalone configuration with extra bundles for debugging

Right-click on the debug.bndrun file, select Run as > Bnd OSGi Run Launcher and the project should launch. Point your browser to http://localhost:8080/be.iminds.iot.firefly.dashboard and the web UI should show up.

By default the Firefly workspace also provides a command line build system using Gradle.

Firefly dashboard UI

The dashboard UI shows all things connected and discovered. Double-click on a thing to configure its name and location. Things can be filtered on location using the menu on the top right. A long click allows to interact with an actuation device, for example allows to set the level and color of a lamp, and see the frames captured by a camera device (this is not tested on all browsers though).

The menu icon at the left side of the top bar gives you access to the rules dialog, where simple if-this-than-that rules can be configured with our rule engine implementation.